You are AT WAR

There’s an information war underway … it’s a CULTURAL war, but your culture is dominated by the media consumed by the individuals making up the culture. When individuals choose not to control the projectors driving their media consumption, they will be programmed by those who are using media programming. Media and advertisting are gigantic industry segments, which basically dominated the mindshare of people in the culture … if you don’t control your information technology, you have basically ceded the cultural war to those who use media programming to herd human zombies.

When you have favorite programs which you much watch every day, YOU have chosen to lose the culture war.

It’s a gross UNDERSTATEMNT to say that your consciousness has been under attack for some time … especially if you have ever been passively consuming television/movies, social media, news media, sports just to COPE with your life … POOR you! Coping with the routine first-world gripes of an affluent cultural is symptomatic of spiritual depravity … feeling sorry for yourself just because you had a long day at work is equivalent to spiritual weakness. Giving in media programming is not a way to cope with life, it’s a way to lose the war without even bothering to fight.

WHEN your passive media choices have become your coping strategy, ie when you want to get home so that you can watch your favorite program OR YouTube channels, you have EFFECTIVELY CHOSEN TO CEDE TOTAL CONTROL of your consiousness.

When we don’t CONTROL the projector, we lose the war without even bothering to fight

We are indeed supremely fortunate to live in what are truly BEYOND AMAZING times when it comes to the availability of content, knowledge and different choices in information technology to tailor what content we project into our consciousness. There is a beyond astounding level of availability of different resources that help humans to control that information flow … but if you choose not to be in control, you will be harvested. Lots of others will volunter to shape, quantify and redirect that information soothe, captivate, fascinate, mesmerize, stupefy, narcotize, charm, entrance and generally hypnotize and addict other humans in terms of their media choices.

Your ancestors, maybe even your parents perhaps, did not really have to develop a serious level of proficiency with information technology. If you are reading this, these are not the times when people can get their news from a printed newspapers any more … you are different because YOU live in what are extremely different, information-technology-dominated times. Walking is one of our preferred activities because of the SILENCE that is possible, but walking not just good meditation and good physical exercise, it’s also better than wasting money on vehicles or a lifestyle dominated by what you can do with an automobile, ie if your life depends upon an automobile, you have become a gadget or an automotive accessory. But, BECAUSE this is an information age and BECAUSE that information can be channeled into the logistics of cost-effectively hauling a perishable commodity like a human carcass for a very low fee, you can easily affort to have some Uber or Lyft driver to drive you wherever you need a vehicle to take you … the same is DEFINITELY NOT true of your information technology … you HAVE TO take charge of it. You cannot just flip on the teevee and let poison get poured into your consciousness. YOU HAVE TO BE PROFICIENT AND CAPABLE IN YOUR USE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. You simply cannot afford not to be control of your information when you are living through an Information Age.

When we don’t CONTROL the projector, we lose the war without even bothering to fight … and the payoff for winning that war for your attention as a retired person [particularly if you one of even modest affluence] is gigantic … just the choice of something like your choice of vehicles, insurance and automotive habits is something that is arguably worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. This is going to sound repitious, but if you want to save $ and be much, MUCH healthier, you need to WALK [several miles a day] and pay someone to drive you when you cannot walk, but above all else stop succumbing to the advertisements for automobiles, Unless you would prefer having an automobile to having your health. Some people would actually choose that, because they cannot imagine walking and thinking that much.

When we don’t CONTROL the projector, we lose the war without even bothering to fight … The consequences of the information war are much more significant than just vehicle choices when it comes to your healthcare decisions … even if your income is at some minimal level and you are approaching your 65th birthday, you will be positively INUNDATED with pitches for one supplemental Medicare plan or another and it doesn’t stop there, ie the undertakers will be courting your funeral business. The difference between these plans is easily a multimillion dollar decision, even if you don’t think you have anywhere close to that kind of money. Wise up – your healthcare is not about health or care or YOU – it’s about what might be financially harvested from a good medicare account. It’s not only a matter of life and death for the individual, but also a matter of what quality of that life, what that life brings to the community, what kind of a death the individual experiences on the final slide into the grave AND what peace and closure and sense of well-being an individual’s loved ones experience after death.

When we don’t CONTROL the projector, we lose the war without even bothering to fight

Sometimes, we might imagine that we ultimately want to control our destiny with our very own bespoke custom crafted on-prem hardware BUT … the reality is that we want to be aware of what’s out ther in terms of GCP, AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, PaperSpace, LambdaLabs, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, Platform9, Cirrity, Rescale, Bright Computing, DigitalOcean … as well as rentable compute thru VAST.ai or LambdaLabs … in addition to what we can cook up with an on-prem home lab …

BUT … gear gets effing expensive [and fills up a closet] in a hurry … even if it’s just refurbed fifth-string, but still kickass stuff from four or five years ago.

We are definitely NOT going to buy cutting edge stuff – we might buy some components for on-prem stuff from eBay or another refurbisher source in order to have a somewhat serious home lab, ie a capability that that five years ago in 2019 would have been on the cutting edge and something that was not even thinkable way back in 2014. After all, why recreate one’s own scientific high performance computing data center, when we just look around, all over the world, at the top ten options that we have … there’s only so much that can be learned from a private collection of gear; conversely, the entire Universe, not just the cloud computing and AI part of that Universe, but the WHOLE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, was built for us to explore.

Why would we ever limit our fucking around to just the collection of shit we own?